Rare News Desk
A lot of you have asked, “Who benefits financially from the new Common Core State Standards?”
Videos by Rare
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution examines that question today and finds that it is not easy to separate out school system spending on Common Core.
The story by AJC education reporter Wayne Washington is subscriber only on MyAJC.com, but here is a snippet.
Millions are being made on Common Core, but it’s not likely parents can figure who’s making that money, or how much a particular school system is spending specifically because of the new standards, since instructional material has always cost plenty and a lot of the “new” stuff isn’t necessarily new.
There is a long list of companies selling what school districts in Georgia and the rest of the country are buying. Education officials in Georgia say most of the money spent on Common Core would have been spent anyway. Teachers participated in professional development before Common Core, and districts have always spent money on books and other learning materials.
Critics of Common Core say one of the problems with the new standards is that no one group is in charge of them or the products and services that are supposedly tied to them.
“If there are errors in the Common Core, if there are goals for a particular grade that are wrong, either too hard or too easy, there is no one who can fix them,” said Diane Ravitch, an education policy analyst and research professor at New York University. “They were released as if they were tablets handed down on Mount Sinai. Any publisher may put a sticker on its textbooks and say they are ‘aligned with Common Core.’ Who can stop them, even if they are not?”
Mike Evans, senior vice president of K-12 literacy and math for the publishing giant Pearson, said his company is careful not to give false impressions of what it sells. “It’s not good for us to slap a label on something and say it’s Common Core-aligned,” Evans said. “Because when someone uses it and finds it’s not different, that just creates a lot of doubt among our customers. We’ve invested millions of dollars across our product offerings.” A book can be considered “aligned to Common Core” if it is among those recommended by the group of business leaders, educators and higher education officials who wrote the new standards.
Being a Common Core book could mean stronger sales. Lynda Bradley, co-owner of BMI Educational Services, Inc. — a sort of book middleman that allows districts to order large quantities of different books from a single source — noted that sales of one book, “A Boy, A Dog and a Frog” by Mercer Mayer, took off after it was recommended as a Common Core book.
“The publishers look at the list and say, ‘Oh, good, we can charge more,’ ” Bradley said. “A lot of them have done that, and that puts us in a bind. The inventory vanishes, and the price goes up.”
Achieve Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that has been heavily involved in writing the standards, receives funding from corporate titans such as Microsoft, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Chevron and DuPont.
Achieve’s five highest-paid executives received an average annual salary of $198,916 in 2011, tax records show. The company’s president, former Clinton administration official Michael Cohen, had a salary of $263,800 in 2011.
Two national consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and Smarter Balanced, having gotten a combined $346 million in federal education grants to create a pair of new standardized tests tied to Common Core.
“These people all know each other,” said Michael T. Moore, a literacy professor at Georgia Southern University who has written extensively about Common Core. “It is a private club.”
Related articles
- Top 10 reasons to oppose Common Core (rare.go-vip.net)
- Under Common Core, wrong answers are totally fine (rare.go-vip.net)
- For Common Core, a new challenge — from the left (Miami Herald)
- Diane Ravitch: Charles Blow Is Wrong About the Common Core (huffingtonpost.com)
